127
Followers
155
Following
Bettie's Books
A Stuga On the Cusp of the Orust Riviera, tucked away next to a hobbit hole in the woods.
Mrs. Reinhardt
bookshelves: film-only, spring-2014, published-1980, france, brittany
Read on April 06, 2014
The titular story only. Helen Mirren and Brad Davis.The husband, played by Ralph Bates:
The great, great nephew of the renowned French scientist Louis Pasteur developed into a strangely handsome dark haired, pale complexioned English actor. Ralph Bates was born in 1940 in Bristol, England and attended the University of Dublin and studied at the Yale Drama School
Description from NY Times: Adapted by Edna O'Brien, the Irish writer, from one of her own short stories. The BBC production, produced by Alan Shawcross (''Churchill and His Generals''), was directed by Piers Haggard (''Pennies From Heaven''). The cast includes Helen Mirren, Brad Davis and Ralph Bates. The ingredients, in other words, are quite promising. The result, however, is only disconcerting, if not downright irritating.
Mrs. Reinhardt (Miss Mirren) is fleeing from her husband in England to a secluded hotel in Brittany. He is openly having an affair with a younger and determinedly sexy young woman. She has managed to keep a valuable necklace, which belonged to her mother. On an outing from the hotel, a beautifully converted 16th-century mill house, she meets a young American bounder named Steve (Mr. Davis). His brash ways dispel her depression, and they begin what looks like a passionate affair. But he suddenly turns into a vicious thug, and Mrs. Reinhardt's strangely intense world begins crumbling once again, especially when she discovers that the necklace is missing.
As usual in Miss O'Brien's literary territory, the presence of a pulsating sensuality, always simmering and often frustrated, dominates everything else in the vicinity. The author is uncommonly adept at evoking this aspect of her stories. The problem is that when she draws closer to her characters, her observations tend to be trite. When, for instance, Mrs. Reinhardt stops to ask a young artist for directions to the hotel and confesses that she is not very good at maps, he must inevitably respond, meaningfully, that maps are very important because they are ''the way we find our way about.''
Later in the hotel's dining room, she watches two lobsters confronting each other in a large glass water tank. ''Are you fighting or making love?'' she wonders to herself (there is a good deal of voice-over ruminations in this adaptation), adding, again meaningfully, ''or is it the same?'' The straining for profundity is just a touch too obvious.
no, just no, to the ending: that could only have been written by an Irish author.
3